Slavery in the American Colonies: Crash Course Black American History #2

In the 17th century, as the British colonies in the Americas were getting established in places like Jamestown, VA, the system of chattel slavery was also developing. Today, we’ll learn about the role that slavery played in early American economy and how slavery became a legally accepted practice in the first place, and how it contributed to the colony’s early economic success. We’ll look at the experiences of Anthony Johnson and John Punch to see how legal precedents that greatly influenced the development of slavery were set.

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Sources and References
“Africans in Early North America, 1619-1726.” African American Lives: the Struggle for Freedom, by Clayborne Carson et al., Pearson Longman, 2005

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1975)

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross, A Black Women’s History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2020).

Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross, Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)

Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968)
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